The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Shouldn't Whitehead's perceptive comment about "the defect of the Greek analysis of generation" -- namely, that it "conceived [generation] in terms of the bare incoming of novel abstract form," and so "failed to grasp the real operation of the antecedent particulars imposing themselves on the novel particular in process of creation" -- be supplemented with a comment about a corresponding defect with respect to the Greek analysis of perishing -- namely, that it conceived perishing in terms of the bare outgoing of novel abstract form, and so failed to grasp the real operation of subsequent particulars creatively appropriating the novel particular whose process of creation has terminated? 

In other words, if our experience in the first and most fundamental division is formed by "the sense of qualitative experience derived from antecedent fact, enjoyed in the personal unity of present fact, and conditioning future fact," so that "it carries with it the placing of our immediate experience as a fact in history, derivative, actual, and effective," then our experience is an experience of "transcendence" not only in one respect but in two – not only the transcendence of the past actualities from which our present experience is derived, but also the transcendence of the future actualities on which our present experience is destined to be effective. In short: we experience the other actualities transcending our own as not only creating it but also consummating it, as both transcendent creators and transcendent consummators.

If it is also true, then, that our experience in this first and most fundamental division further involves experiencing that "[w]e are, each of us, one among others; and all of us are embraced in the unity of the whole," then the transcendent creators and consummators we experience include "the many which are one" and "the one which includes the many"; and also experiencing that "there are two senses of the one—namely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many "—we may say that, just as every "one among the many," i.e., the self and all others, is both a creator and a consummator, "the one which is all," i.e., "the whole," is precisely the Creator and the Consummator.

10 September 2003

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